I do! I do! Obviously my grant applications will have to be emailed rather than mailed.

Sorry, your partly real status as a hand puppet excludes you.

And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.

It may not be nonsense but it's awfully close to a so-what. Not unlike -- to use your global warming analogy -- Canada rushing to curb carbon emissions when we're 2% of the global emissions total.

If toner was causing the death of us all, it's been doing it via copiers since the Fifties, and via laser printers since the mid-Eighties. I wonder which method of toner emission could have amassed a greater notional body count, given a thirty-four-year head start?

Toner is negatively-charged, plastic-based powder, and has been with us since Chester F. Carlson invented the photocopier in 1937. When it comes to the application of the toner to the paper, photocopiers and laser printers operate on the same principle and equipment -- rollers applying heat and pressure to fuse the toner particles to the paper.

Maybe the Queensland University of Technology would also be good enough to study the toner emission properties of commercially-available photocopiers since 1951, but that would probably involve a lot of real (and unsensational) work.

Interesting Chris. I thank you. One would think that with my background and what I do for a living, I would know what Toner was comprised of... I thought it was carbon and pigment not stopping to think "well, why does it bind to paper when heated.." hrmmm.. Airborn plastic resins and pigments.. In an industrial setting one would have to have fume hoods or wear PPE if one sat beside or used one all day..

wow.

I do think printers emit some unpleasant stuff that undoubtedly is bad for us in large quantities. The old desk-sized HP LaserJet III I had would dim the lights and heat up an entire 15x20' room by a couple of degrees when I printed a few pages.

For researchers to suddenly get wound up and blame only the most recent appliance to use a given technology is a little stunned. We've had this technology for a while, and in certain contexts it can be bad news. If printers are bad news, so are copiers, fax machines, cash registers and anything else that employs heat to transfer plastic-based toner. By all means sound the alarm, but recognise that the threat is a little broader than just laser printers.

<i>...For researchers to suddenly get wound up and blame only the most recent appliance to use a given technology is a little stunned...</i><p>But my GSAS (general societal anxiety syndrome) depends on that!

Holy crap, I am dead. [coff coff] At work I sit next to a printer so massive and powerful that no one has gotten up the gumption to even think about moving it for years.